There are two films at work in Hateship Loveship. One is an affecting gander into a twilight-years romance, while the other is a slog starring Kristen Wiig in a questionable dramatic role. Take a guess which one gets the bulk of the running time.
Adapted from a story by prolific author Alice Munro, Hateship Loveship mistakes the thread involving Johanna, Wiig’s character, as the one worth following. Johanna is a caretaker who moves in with the McCauley family in an undisclosed part of the South (though credits reveal the film was shot in and around New Orleans) to look after the teenage Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld) and her grandfather (Nick Nolte) in the wake of Sabitha’s mother’s passing. In a spat of jealousy, the angsty Sabitha and her conniving, pixie-cut friend Edith (a deliciously soulless Sami Gayle) spawn a scheme involving phony emails and promises of romance from Sabitha’s father Ken (Guy Pearce), a recovering drug addict.
If the material provides any prickles, it’s never too long before they’re softened by some unfortunate creative fumble. In what may have been the film’s tensest scene, Johanna arrives at the dilapidated motel Ken has made his project, not knowing what we already know: that Ken has been relapsing and fooling around with Chloe (Jennifer Jason Leigh), another addict, and is entirely unaware of his daughter’s mischievous orchestration of a bogus love connection. As Johanna inches closer to the sleeping Ken, anticipating a happy reunion she’ll never receive, light and fluttery acoustic guitar trickles over the soundtrack, dispelling any and all tension as Johanna realizes something isn’t quite right before Ken wakes up and the inevitable confusion-explanation-humiliation train hurtles into the station.
Most of the scenes involving Johanna, Ken and Chloe exist only to hit certain story buttons. When Ken stumbles across Johanna’s ample stash of cash and pockets a few hundred bucks, it’s only to result later either in a scene of confrontation, or of admittance following Ken’s emotional growth. It’s by-the-numbers stuff devoid of unpredictability, settling angularly into trite inevitability.
Except when the film checks in on Mr. McCauley (Nolte), who Johanna has skipped out on to pursue her unceremonious union with Ken. Director Liza Johnson and screenwriter Mark Jude Poirier miscalculate what they’ve devised here as filler when it rightly deserved its own film. Mr. McCauley sparks a refreshingly optimistic romance with a sweet bank teller, Eileen (Christine Lahti), and in only a few scenes the two cull sympathy and hope for these people about whom we know very little. There is no mystery of what brought them to this point in their lives – other than that Mr. McCauley has lost a wife and a daughter, which doesn’t cast as dark a cloud over his head as one might expect from a story otherwise so transparent – and it doesn’t matter, for Nolte and Lahti reveal everything worth knowing about their characters through a pair of richly lived-in performances.
Likewise Steinfeld, who has shed every cell of her cumbersome, marble-mouthed, inexplicably Oscar-nominated performance in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, communicates more in her eyes than in any patch of dialogue. When Mr. McCauley returns home following his tryst with Eileen to find his teenage granddaughter on the couch waiting disapprovingly, he shoots down her reproach by leaning in, sniffing the air around her face and conceding the ability to determine which brand of beer she’s been drinking, to which she respectfully backs down. It’s a terrific moment, and a delight to see the usually gruff Nolte so playful. The gall is that these good scenes don’t make a bad film better. They’re too disparate to be considered of the same piece, which only magnify the bad film’s weaknesses.
But the real draw of Hateship Loveship will be Wiig in her slightest performance to date. The reliable comedian will no doubt one day find a dramatic role that suits her chameleonic tendencies as an actress, but this isn’t it. Wiig’s performance is so mannered and consciously restrained that she ultimately molds Johanna into a less interesting and confident version of her SNL character Penelope, the one who incessantly mutters her life’s achievements to one-up those of the people around her. With no insight into Johanna’s psychology, a person this timid and awkward comes off certifiable rather than merely sad, which would have been a bolder, more credible character choice for Johanna.
When it comes to Hateship Loveship, jump ship.